PARALLEL EQUATIONS
involved all over the place. I would sus- pect that there’s a standard time to load and unload each of the items that could be moved. Sometimes our human team members will perform according to those standards, and sometimes, for whatever reason (humans get sick or weather inter- feres), we’ll see variation in the cycle time for the loading and unloading of items.
You put all of those sources of variation together, and you’re likely to end up with an outcome that isn’t the expected value of what you planned. And I think it’s very helpful upfront to consider some scenar- ios for what you would do when the plan is not met.
Q. All of which underscores that this is a hugely complex and not entirely predict- able operation. What you’ve described, the what-if planning, is something that goes on in the military all the time.
A. Yes. Te what-if planning has been going on for a long time, but we now have modeling and computing power that allows you to build more sophisticated models. Te advantage of those is that you can sit with people and they don’t have to imagine it in the same way. You can do active simulations—imagine that we were in the heat of the moment and the following thing happens, what would we do? Well, you have the model in front of you, and you can, in near-real time, prepare answers with precision that in the past just wouldn’t have been possible because we didn’t have enough data in the models.
Q. What exactly did you mean by auditing the outcomes predicted for reasonableness?
A. I just mean that it’s an intuition test. When you have these kinds of computer models, the most valuable thing that they do, I think, is to help humans, especially in a one-off project like this. If you can run models regularly over a long period of time, eventually the model gets good enough that you don’t need that much human input.
An example is a control system in a complicated petrochemical plant. Tese plants run through significant transients, or periods of variation, without a lot of human input, because the control systems have been running for a long time. Tey’ve been tuned, and the computers know what to do. In this one- off project, any simulation that you build is not going to be such that the machine can run the project. It’s going to be such that the humans are better prepared to lead the project.
Q. So they’re all on the same sheet of music, so to speak.
A. Exactly. Te best audits are performed by the humans who, during the execu- tion phase, will actually be managing and leading. In advance, you can have those humans sit around with the com- puter models that you built and test them for reasonableness. You start with human intuition about how robust the system will be, or how long things will take, or how effective we can be. And you want
to look at the outputs of the model and use that great human intuition and ask, does it make sense? If a human looks at it and says, “I’m glad that analysts have predicted that this is what’s going to hap- pen, but I can tell you, I’ve been in the field, and I know that this particular step is going to take longer than the model’s predicting,” then we can make the plan better. In these audits of the output of the simulation, we’re trying to catch things, assumptions, that are wrong in the models, applying human experience and intuition.
I’ve been talking about this from the
perspective you asked me to think about, as if I were the leader of the whole thing. Tese models are incredibly use- ful at all levels of execution of such a mission. Since this precise military chal- lenge has never been completed—just as no one had been through direct-to- consumer logistics challenges like we had in the early 2000s—I would not expect to have a computer model direct movement autonomously.
Tinking about this problem reminds me of our early holiday season at Amazon. com. During our peak four or five weeks of ordering, which is between Tanksgiv- ing and Christmas, we have an increase in our logistics activity of about three to four times the average rate for the rest of the year. So the challenge, of course, is to have a team ready to perform to a play- book that is very different during those four to five weeks than for all of the other weeks of the year. Tat is the primary leadership challenge at Amazon.
WE’VE FOUND THAT INDIVIDUALS WITH A MILITARY BACKGROUND DO INCRED IBLY WELL IN ROLES ALL OVER OUR OPERATIONS’ ORGANIZATION. THEY HAVE THE RIGHT BIAS FOR ACTION AND COMFORT WITH RAPIDLY CHANG ING ENVIRONMENTS.
116 Army AL&T Magazine October–December 2013
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